When Lena arrived in Ireland as a forced migrant with two small children, everything still felt temporary. The room they were given did not feel like home, and the future remained impossible to imagine.
So when they reached Killarney, she bought the cheapest tent she could find and took her family to sleep in the park.
The tent became the first place that truly felt like theirs.
As the weeks passed, nature offered the first stable structure in a life suspended by war and displacement: the park, the lake, the ocean reached by bus, and later the forest paths around Killarney.
At the center of this experience was a deeply physical sense of repair:
“I FELT AS IF THERE HOLES IN MY BODY FROM EVERYTHING THAT HAD HAPPENED, AND THIS GREENERY WAS FILLING THEM WITH GREEN LIGHT.”
What changed in Ireland was not her relationship with nature itself, but its constant accessibility — the possibility of stepping outside and immediately beginning to restore herself.
That same path led her to a forest school in Beaufort, reached by bicycle with her daughter asleep in the seat behind her. There she found not only rest, but community: people whose values of children, land, and slowness mirrored her own.
For Lena, the forest became more than landscape. It became the place where the feeling of home slowly returned.
Project: Healing Land.Voices Voice: Lena Location: Killarney, Ireland